NS2 Build 208 is now live on Steam! news - Natural Selection 2

Alien Commander love

• Fixing the alien commander economy so the player must make a trade-off between attacking, expanding and teching up.
• Cysts and Drifters cost energy
• Hives don't start with any Drifters
• Tweaked Hive, Harvester, upgrade structures, hydra and egg maturation times (generally shorter)
• Reduced cyst connection range somewhat
• Increased Drifter move speed to make them feasible near combat
• Hives can be dropped without needing infestation (to allow fast expansion)
• Added Enzyme Cloud - a new Drifter ability which allows the Commander to cast a cloud into battle which speeds up the rate of fire for all aliens inside it
• Simplified alien commander UI

Balance

• Think I overcompensated with mature harvester health (now it's +10% instead of +20%)
• Bumped up harvester and Hive health to be closer to NS1.
• Changed Bile Bomb damage to 55 and increased splash damage radius to 6.
• Reduced energy cost for Gorge abilities to make him more responsive and interesting.

Changes

• Improved Gorge bellyslide
• Removed mini-cysts because they were confusing and redundant with regular Cysts (they also tended to break cyst chains when the Gorge died)
• Nutrient mist now affects single target
• Gorges can now build structures off infestation
• The outgoing voice volume is louder.
• Updated Drifter tooltip text.
• Reduced player FOV used to detect other players for the minimap.
• Touching enemy cloaked unit will now uncloak them.
• Med/ammo packs cost now Command Station energy.
• Unbuilt structures start now with an armor fraction (was health fraction only before)
• Increased jetpack maneuverability and removed backwards flying penalty.
• The Axe will now show a crosshair hit indicator.
• Cysts / Hives generate now infestation on walls and ceilings.
• Shade cloak is now a passive ability and requires no energy.
• Players can no longer get cloaked by shades.
• Ammo/med packs cost now armory energy.
• Gorge structures won't die anymore when the owner Gorge enters the Hive.
• Infestation does not grant LOS anymore (won't generate Hive sight / minimap blips)
• Decreased 'randomness' of Shotgun. (predefined bullet spread pattern that rotates randomly around the players view axis)

Fix

• Smoothed out skulk movement (removed hyper responsiveness when landing on ground, changed sticky force to depend on wall normal)
• The health will no longer display on the Welder for unsocketed Power Points.
• Fixed bug where key the backward and right keybindings would be correct when first running the game.
• Make sure LeaveMenu is called when exiting out of the main menu.
• Properly deactivate and activate mods when updating them. Fixed refreshing of the mod list so that it refreshes the list of all subscribed mods as well as all downloaded-but-not-subscribed mods.
• Fixed bug where unpack was called on a table with holes when notifying the Marine of new upgrades (can lead to unpredictable results)
• Fixed memory leak when removing a source from the file system.
• Fixed a rare bug where sometimes an Alien player would not be able to spawn after a Hive was killed.
• Fixed problem were ARC continues charge up effect after losing LOS.
• Added shade minimap icon.
• Fixed bug where spectator camera flips when looking straight up/down.
• Raised arc splash damage origin a bit to fix problems with tiny ledges at the ground.
• Command Stations show now correctly a range indicator when you attempt to drop an infantry portal.
• Fixed bug that allowed you to use shadow step while stabbing.
• Disabled jetpack smoke trail effects for the local player which were causing FPS problems.
• Fixed bug where nano shield/construct trigger sounds where played at the Command Station instead of target position.
• Fixed initial infantry portal floating.
• Fixed crash when calling RenderMaterial.GetLayer with an invalid index (now generates a script error)
• Fixed bug which allowed you to place mines on clogs.
• Fixed a bug that caused the Fade to occasionally get stuck when blinking.
• Fixed a bug which allowed you to drop a Command Station on an infested techpoint.
• Fixed issue where hot loading script would cause errors due to mixins being recreated.
• Fixed bug where blend times for the animation graph did not take into account the speed of the animation.
• Fixed potential crash bug when sending strings as part of network messages.
• Fixed crash when a font couldn't be rendered due to the system being out of video memory.
• Various crashes related to collision objects being destroyed.
• Fixed bug where nutrient mist was not correctly affecting researches.

Improvement

• Reduced network traffic regarding minimap blips.
• Improved spit effect.
• Sped up heal spray by 34% to make more responsive (adjusted energy cost and healing correspondingly)
• Fixing the Alien Commander economy so the player must make a trade-off between attacking, expanding and teching up.
• Marine way point lines are now color coded (red: attack, green: defend)

Optimization

• Reduced the number of times pose parameters were updated for a model.
• Reduced the overhead of accessing a member variable from script.
• Reduced the amount of animation code that is executed on the Client.
• Decreased amount of bandwidth needed for each player a bit.
• Disable PhysX visualization unless debug draw enabled.

SDK

• Fixed issue where materials in the Viewer did not properly receive the time parameter.
• Fixed hot loading in the Viewer.
• Fixed crash when Undoing a Copy and Paste operation in the Editor.
• Added the ability to speed up an animation in a model_compile file by including speed after the animation name.
• Added a simple implementation of GetRandomPointsWithinRadius in Pathing code.

Sound

• Hive rooms now have an alien rainforest sound in them.
• Extended the distance you can hear active Extractors
• Hooked up various MAC sounds.